The most popular issue of course is Digital Rights Management, or DRM. Digital content locked by DRM can only be played on approved devices. Current DRM schemes used for digital media severely limit how a consumer uses the content they purchase. Most people will remember this is the reason they couldn’t play their iTunes purchased music on non-Apple media players. Though the music industry slowly moved away from DRM, almost every other type of digital distribution still uses DRM. When I buy a DVD, I am free to play it in thousands of different devices, something that can’t be said for the movie I purchase from Amazon’s Video on Demand service.* The argument goes that DRM prevents piracy, but that’s never been clearly established. The truth is that those individuals savvy enough and determined enough to engage in piracy aren’t hampered by DRM. Some well-thought out searches on Google will yield multiple methods to circumvent common DRM schemes. The collatoral damage from this war on piracy: honest consumers.

It’s not all bad though. Digital distribution has brought greater accessibility and convenience to consumers. Like a song you heard on the radio? Download it to your media player in less than a minute. Want to read the latest New York Times bestseller? Start devouring it on your e-reader in seconds. And though convenience may seem like the crowning achievement of digital distribution, I’d argue it’s actually accessibility (or discoverability). It has never been easier to find new content than in the digital age. I can listen to a song, read a chapter of a book, or watch a few moments of a feature length movie, all before committing my hard earned cash. That means I’m willing to look at what else might be out there.  But beyond trying before you buy, digital distribution actually enables consumers to find related content, from novels in the same genre to remixes of you favorite song. Most popular digital distribution venues use some method of displaying suggested content. Looking for The Hunger Games in the Kindle Store, I see that I might want to consider A Song of Ice and Fire. Maybe I should check it out.

Both of these issues are probably ones you’ve considered before, but what does the death of physical media mean for individual ownership? In all of this, the idea of ownership has been changing slowly for the worse and not many people realize it. When you purchase physical media, you own it fair and square. You do not enter into any form of binding agreement when you pay for a DVD or Blu-Ray.** You trade a (sometimes) reasonable sum of money in exchange for a physical item. It’s not that different from buying a chair. However, when you buy a piece of digital content, things get more complicated. Purchasing digital content actually requires agreeing to a limited license. This license details how you may use the digital content, what rights you have to it, and sometimes how the license can be revoked. Yup. That’s right–revoked. Let’s say you buy a digital comic book on Tuesday. You can have it taken away from you on Wednesday when the publisher decides you shouldn’t have it anymore. The linked example highlights the very really impact that digital distribution has on ownership. In the digital age, consumers are really purchasing a license to consume content, not to own it. If you ever want proof that you don’t own the digital content you’ve purchased, try to sell it. The FBI agent that shows up on your doorstep will politely explain the error of your ways as he gives you some new wrist accessories. Ever get tired of a video game you thought you’d love playing forever? Well, if you downloaded it, you have no way of recovering any of that expense. If, however, you bought it on a disc, you can drive down to your (occasionally not-so-)friendly neighborhood GameStop and get ten percent of what you paid for it, because you actually own the disc. You won’t get much, but you’ll get something. You’ll also be able to buy someone else’s cast-offs for a significant discount over new games, something that isn’t possible with digital content.

So where does that leave us? Well, time will tell if the current trend of DRM-laden limited license digital content will persist. We can hope that everyone will learn the lesson the music industry learned, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. In reality, I think that more digital distribution mechanisms will tend toward the model that Netflix Instant Streaming has developed. Basically, you pay a fixed cost for an ongoing limited license to consume content. The main difference from most other methods: there is no illusion of ownership.

*It is true that DVDs employ DRM, but their implementation is far less restrictive than the methods employed on digital movie files.
**I know that this isn’t completely true. You are agreeing to abide by the laws governing the purchase of copyrighted material. It is actually a limited license, but it is far less limited than the license that accompanies digital media.